This is lifted from an article by Nick Davies, published in The Guardian, Saturday 7th May 2016 because it is never too late for Marcos fans to “see the light”.

It is sad that many diehard Ilocanos won’t even bother to read it because they know they will not like the truth. They will simply rationalize this as anti-Marcos propaganda and claim Marcos’s wealth derived from a few gold bars he was given for legal advice before he became President. If they are prepared to believe such a fantasy then there is no hope they will ever come to terms with the real facts that Marcos STOLE from the Philippines, killed, maimed, tortured, disappeared or imprisoned anyone that got in his way. These are the true facts:

In the early hours of a February morning in 1986, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos flew into exile. After 21 years as president of the Philippines, Marcos had rigged one too many elections. The army had turned against him, and the people had come out on to the streets in their thousands. The Marcoses had seen the crisis coming and been able to prepare their escape, so when they landed that morning at the Hickham USAF base in Hawaii, they brought several possessions with them.

The official US customs record runs to 23 pages. In the two C-141 transport planes that carried them, they had packed: 23 wooden crates; 12 suitcases and bags, and various boxes, whose contents included enough clothes to fill 67 racks; 413 pieces of jewellery, including 70 pairs of jewel-studded cufflinks; an ivory statue of the infant Jesus with a silver mantle and a diamond necklace; 24 gold bricks, inscribed “To my husband on our 24th anniversary”; and more than 27m Philippine pesos in freshly-printed notes. The US Customs valued the loot at $15 million.

It was a fortune by any standards, more than enough to see the couple through the rest of their lives. The government of the Philippines knew this was only a miniscule part of the Marcoses’ wealth. They discovered the reality later that Ferdinand Marcos had amassed a fortune up to 650 times greater. According to a subsequent estimate by the Philippine Supreme Court, he had accumulated up to $10 billion while in office.

His official salary had never risen above $13,500 a year. It was clear this was stolen wealth on the most spectacular scale. Some of his closest allies also stole billions. As their victim was a nation in which 40% of the people survive on less than $2 a day, the Republic of the Philippines decided urgently to try to retrieve its money.

The first executive order issued by the new president Corazon Aquino, was the establishment of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, the PCGG. It was to recover “all ill-gotten wealth accumulated by former president Ferdinand Marcos, his immediate family, relatives, subordinates and close associates.” PCGG was given the power to sequester any assets believed to be the proceeds of crime. Thirty years later, the PCGG is still working, its 94 lawyers, researchers and administrators housed in a building

recovered from the Marcos family. The government gives it an annual budget of $2.2m. Its staff have traced money through jurisdictions all over the world and fought their way through hundreds of court cases. And yet something has gone terribly wrong. To date, the PCGG has recovered only a fraction of what was stolen by the Marcos network. No one has served a prison sentence for their part in the crime.

Now, with its task still far from complete, the survival of PCGG is threatened by a political development that would never have been anticipated by the crowds who swelled the streets in triumph as Marcos fled. The late president’s son, generally known as “Bongbong”, became a candidate for vice-president in the national elections last month. Had he won, he would have had the power to shut down the PCGG, as political allies of his family have tried to do in the past. The world’s biggest thief would have won.

Last month, the author of this piece was given unrestricted access to the enormous archive the PCGG has assembled in its years of global detective work: the president’s handwritten diary, frequently puffed with self-regard; the notepaper headed “From the office of the president”, with scribbled sums endlessly totting up his cash; minutes of company meetings with his comments scrawled in the margins; contracts; “side agreements”; records of multiple bank accounts; hundreds of share certificates; private investigators’ reports; and tens of thousands of pages of court judgments.

The PCGG archive tells the inside story of the biggest theft in history, and of the master criminal who organised it. It also opens a door into the offshore world revealed by the Panama Papers.

But what is most important about Marcos is that he committed his crimes as a politician. His career starts with a cynicism that now seems familiar — manipulating electorates, using money to buy power and power to make money. But he went one big step further in merging politics and finance, converting the instruments of government into one vast cash machine. Marcos was a model of the politician as thief.

A single document in the Manila archive marks the start of the detective story. In a sworn deposition, a young civil servant named Chito Roque describes how, on the night the Marcoses flew into exile, he worked his way through the crowds outside the presidential palace to the gates where anxious soldiers were posted. He was with his boss, a senior official in the new government, and they eventually found their way into the inner sanctum, the Marcoses’ private living quarters. There, they could see the signs of hasty flight: food still warm on the dining table, empty boxes, papers scattered on the floor, shredding machines stuffed with more paper.

His boss went home, but Chito wandered into the bedroom of the deposed president, where “I saw a filing cabinet and I opened the first drawer and I saw a safe inside and there were numbers, a combination that was pasted on the door, so I followed the combination and opened the safe.” Inside, he found records of bank accounts in Switzerland and Canada, share certificates and several letters signed by Marcos.